American Warfare: 250 Things Americans Have Never Learned, Forgotten, and Ignored About War

By Jeffrey L Adkins

I am submitting this to you, dear reader, unsolicited, in hopes that you will incorporate it into any educating, planning, debating, and, of most importance, thinking that you might tend to do in the future when it comes to war and warfare for our once great nation, the United States of America.

The war in Iraq, Operation Iraqi Freedom, was a tragedy and a travesty that is now almost surely fading from memory. It cannot be possible, but yet a man was campaigning for president with the promise "When I become President, I'll send troops back to Iraq!" That is what happens when a man who has never been to war or has never seen his sons go to war dreams of authority and power with the grasp of the reins of authority and power of the constitution in his hands. The Iraq War was wrong, and, like the Vietnam War, we should never again, willingly or unwittingly, allow wars like it to be part of our way of life.

Please do not toss this out! If you feel that this document, American Warfare: 250 Things Americans Have Forgotten, Never Learned, and Ignored about War, is simply contemptuous and beneath your consideration, then simply pass it along to someone else whom you believe could make use of it. Someone, somehow, will consider that I am right.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781662458637

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American Warfare

250 Things Americans Have Never Learned, Forgotten, and Ignored About War

Jeffrey L Adkins

Copyright © 2022 Jeffrey L. Adkins

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2022

Original Copyright, Library of Congress, 2010, 2012.

ISBN 978-1-6624-5862-0 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-5863-7 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

NEVER AGAIN ALLOW OUR CONSTITUTION, MILITARY, ECONOMY AND PEOPLE TO BE SCOURGED BY ANOTHER VIETNAM OR IRAQ WAR!

JEFFREY L ADKINS

16 MAY 50–

VETERAN OF INFANTRY

Note: Since this manuscript’s official copyright, many historical events and facts have developed that give a sense of relevancy regarding the author’s pursuit of truth, insight, and foresight in American Warfare: 250 Things Americans Have Forgotten, Never Learned, and Ignored about War. Some of these developments were included post original copyright and indicated in notes within parentheses.

Preface

Preface: 2011

George W. Bush, the forty-third president of the United States; the Brookings Institute; the American Enterprise Institute; Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice of the US State Department; Donald Rumsfeld and others in the US Department of Defense; Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet; Vice President Dick Cheney; the Republican Party; cable television network Fox News; enabling talk-radio hosts; the loud-mouthed patriots who did not go or who did not send their own children; the foreign exiles who lied and who do not fight for their own country; American lawyers who skillfully abetted it; the members of Congress who blindly voted for it; and all of the neoconservatives who adhered to the Project for the New American Century are criminals who have wantonly committed the crime and scourge of unnecessary war.

The invasion, occupation, and attempted subjugation of the sovereign state of Iraq, no matter how repugnant the regime of Saddam Hussein, was a violation of international law, an egregious challenge to the Constitution of the United States, a ruination of the nation’s military, foreign policy, economy, and hubris, and a threat to the people of the United States. Not even was the War of 1812 period, the Civil War period, the post-WWI period, the Great Depression, the Vietnam War period, or the post-Vietnam War recession combined ever more calamitous to our nation than what that war in Iraq has brought upon us.

Why? For what reason, despite sober warnings against it, was our nation, our armed forces, our economy, and our constitution goaded (not guided) into a war of choice through lies, misdirection, threat, cover-up, obstinance, and abject treason? Why did the American people, especially those who had served in war, experienced combat, served for more than an hour and a day, and suffered the battlefield grievances allow those who had not such education, training, and experiences to lead us into the oblivion of useless battle? Why did they, who had suffered so much through sight, pain, fear, and loss as a result of unimaginable horror upon our own land, permit a perverted government to divert everything we had, especially our attention, imagination, wealth, armed forces, and our children from our pursuit of justice in the valid war in Afghanistan against Al-Qaeda, and the Taliban degenerates who supported and protected it, for that perverted government’s own pleasure and aggrandizement called Operation Iraqi Freedom? Why did not our soldiers, our legislators, our diplomats, our judges, our teachers, our renowned wise men and wise women stand up to say "No. We are not Nazi Germany to waste our children, our treasure, our resources, our pride, and our friends on a new front of war that we do not need while we must subdue our true enemy! We will not permit our lives, and our fortunes to be vested in the overseas adventurous pleasures of they who are idle in everything but what Satan himself offers only to them!"

Why? And yet here we are: a precipice so steep and a pit so unfathomable in our nation’s history that our very existence as a sovereign nation seems on the brink of doubt. We have no one to blame but ourselves, and we have no place to go but to our own supine country. Yet, because of the abovementioned conspirators and the stupid war in Iraq, our once-great nation (no, we will never be great again!) is now, in 2011, of the common era, going the way of all great states, nation, and empires to the trash heap of history.

We had ignored the dictum of President Eisenhower when, in 1961, upon leaving office, he warned the nation against those who, seeking for their own villainy, would be cause for the ruin of our constitution, our morals, our wealth, and our grand experiment in the pursuit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is not mere pessimism or cynicism. It happened to the Romans too, beginning in the first century of the common era, when Emperor Augustus, on his deathbed (14 CE), warned his successors against voraciously expanding the already-vast extent of the Roman Empire, a plea which was ignored, and successive emperors and emperor pretenders vied to expand the empire to claim their own glory and gold. Rome fell (although collapsing slowly!) because of horrific, selfish personal greed, corruption, and vanity, and now the United States of America follows suit.

I do not think it wrong of me to look forward to the future of our nation with a dour mood. No, I cannot predict the future—no one can—but with the historical footpaths of preceding states, nations, and empires so strikingly familiar, it is difficult to ignore the ground truths. The war in Iraq destroyed us. And rather than make contrition and be humble in their reparations to make our nation, constitution, armed forces, diplomacy, and economics somewhat whole again, they, the abovementioned perpetrators, instead have made a clean break from the past (to openly divest the George W. Bush era!); to refute their own responsibility; to keep their own unbridled counsel close to their vests; to galvanize the disparate canyon between themselves and those of us who work, create, serve, and who are not financially endowed; to tout boisterously their great measure of personal wealth as the proof of the redemption from God; to market their class as the only hope and archetype of all mankind; and to create unwarranted revulsion for a new president who did have the audacity of hope (apparently against hope!) to turn our nation around and to put us upon the peaceful, prosperous, and innovative path which is the true hallmark of all we who call ourselves Americans.

Because of they who are mentioned above, we are lost; and we cannot, will not, find our way back!

Introduction

Introduction: A Road of Grief and Wisdom regarding War

In mid-May 2003, just a few weeks after President George W. Bush made his ridiculous (evident even at that time) Mission Accomplished speech regarding a misperceived end of the Iraq War (Operation Iraqi Freedom) from the flight deck of the US Navy aircraft carrier while off the coast of California, my son called home from his US Air Force base in Turkey. It was with great relief that his voice was heard, but I sadly found that I was reluctantly drifting, searching really, to detect in his tones any sense of the thousand-yard stare that nearly all persons who witness military combat acquire. Yet, I could not help, nor could I deny, that beyond the great relief felt in being a parent, there was too a great sense of pride in my being a citizen and a military veteran of the United States of America (not only for him but for all those who had willfully or unwittingly participated in that egregious deed).

Job well done! I saluted in my best, but coarse with age, military voice, saving the Welcome Home! part for later (yeah, much later, as it turned out!).

The conversation was brief, very brief, of course, but he managed, without being prompted to rapid fire off a crisp (unclassified!) itinerary of his exploits in the sky above Iraq during the invasion. He was ebullient with accomplishment—much more than I had remembered him being in his childhood school football and wrestling days only a few short years before. And there flashed a tiny thought that he was aware, for my benefit, that while the war of my generation was merely a contagion of deceit and defeat, his was a compound of brilliance, technology, speed, and victory! (Not for nothing did I often at length ponder that for thirty years, from 1953 to 1983, this nation must have harbored the most incapable armed forces and the most stupid generals and admirals!). But at that then, my mood changed. Being the proud father of a war veteran was fine, but my son’s (and the nation’s) flush with victory moment simply had to be tempered by what I knew to be the reality.

Well, you still have a lot of work to do over there, I sullenly expressed as our phonecom began to wind down.

Oh, the war is basically over anyway! he quipped in a crude way, emulating his commander-in-chief.

No, it’s not I challenged.

Yes, it is! he blurted out in that standing up to Dad voice that would soon be an embarrass-singly common practice (though that attitude too is what new battlefield warriors develop and bring home!).

No sense arguing. It was his generation’s war, and he was there, and not all of the lessons of war and battle are not not learned, not forgotten, and not ignored. Perhaps this lesson regarding the futility of US aggression in Iraq would soon fall into one or more of these categories. As for the nation…,well…

Listen, I closed out. Just remember, the best you should do is accomplish your mission, always take care of your people, and bring yourself home alive! (my three As that I believe for which American soldiers at war should strive!)

Okay, Dad!

I guess at that point it was up, up, and away! for him as he apparently rejoined the great national delusion, diversion, and morass in the renewed pursuit for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the nascent hunt for the then already elusive Saddam Hussein, and the faux crusade and deceptive quest to bring the facade of liberty, democracy, and justice to the people of…Iraq.

* * *

In December 2004, I noticed that my son was in both an extremely agitated and a depressingly dour mood. It was just after the deadly insurgent sacrifice bombing in the US Air Force dining facility near Baghdad which was followed immediately by one of my son’s troops (as he addressed all of those whom he apparently supervised) losing her leg apparently to a land mine while patrolling inside the perimeter of a former Soviet airbase in Afghanistan a few days later. But there was something else: I knew that the war in Iraq had long reached the point where soldiers would be, and were being, rendered numb to the killing and to the death on both sides. The tempo of the war for the people fighting it, the people on the ground, was then (as a nature of all and every war) simply one of personal survival. Damn it, just get home alive!

What’s wrong? I asked, knowing full well that my question was not one of mere parental curiosity but one of simple psychology instead.

Everybody’s pissed off! he responded angrily.

Why?

"They told us there would be weapons of mass destruction, and there aren’t any."

* * *

Since I was eight years old, I have been a soldier, and though not always in a designated battle dress uniform (BDU), I have been at war since then, like von Clausewitz. Whatever endeavor I pursue in life, I too must first cross a great battlefield.

Forever, I will never forget the pall of stench which emanates, whenever it rains, from the places where the Nazis gleefully committed their mass murders. I shall never be remiss to note how beautiful Japanese women exchange the patience in their eyes for that of terror as they recount to me the suffering in their childhoods experienced from American jelly bombs or from American internment. I must never deny the ravages of war upon the lives of all they who stand before me after surviving from Asia, Africa, and Latin America; from Pearl Harbor, Iwo Jima, Normandy Beachhead, and the Ardennes; from the Naktong Line, Chosin Reservoir, Pork Chop Hill, and the Gauntlet; from Dak To, from the Killing Fields, from Beirut, and from 73 Easting. I know that when I am in my grave for a thousand years and there is war on the now amorphous planet Pluto, and I have never been to Pluto and will never go to Pluto (because I’m dead!), I will still know war, and no one, especially anyone who has no education, training, or experience of war, has the right to tell me to shut up about war. I do not merely think, as some propose, that I know about war; I know that I know about war, and I have the psychological, physiological, socioeconomic, cultural, and spiritual scars to prove it.

When I was leaving Vietnam after first tour, I found myself physically exhausted and emotionally drained (it is true—so exhausted that I felt I could actually sleep for a year; see the B Troop 7/17th Air Cavalry, Aero-Rifle Platoon photo taken on my last day in the field! [www.B/7/17AirCavalry.com]), horrified (so horrified that I almost went vegetarian after being traumatized in seeing so many of the battle dead reposed there, often like pieces of my favorite cuts of cooked meat!), and confused (a single year upon the western Central Highlands intractable ground truth reality refuted three years of scholastic study and more than a solid year of military training [as well as all the fantasy readings and viewings of what was processed to me as war and the Vietnam War!] regarding Vietnam and the conflict there!). In the final weeks, I had vowed that when I got home, I would be the one to find the two truths: (1) How did the United States get involved in Vietnam? and (2) how did human beings come into this thing called warfare in the first place?

"You need to start with Dien Bien Phu."¹ A college-educated African American Vietnam veteran combat infantryman, who had served in the 4th Infantry Division (in the Central Highlands), told me regarding the origins of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam when we were both slumming with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment at Fort Lewis, Washington. And so it was there that I began Hell in a Very Small Place by Bernard B. Fall, a Frenchman who apparently either loved everything about what was then called French Indochina or who had simply and finally found an unfortunate fatal anchor after being adrift since the German invasion and defeat of France in 1940. That began the trail of books (later I read many of what I felt were better books than Fall’s regarding the Battle of Dien Bien Phu) even as I was finding out, something that I should have learned long before, that things,